By Dr John Mullins, Associate Professor of Management Practice in Marketing and Entrepreneurship, London Business School
When I wrote earlier in 2025 about the shifting landscape for British entrepreneurs, Why The Business Landscape Is Changing For British Entrepreneurs, Forbes, August 14 2025, I suggested the country’s biggest challenge was not lack of talent or ideas, but structural inertia, a persistent gap between brilliant early-stage ventures and fully scaled businesses. Too often, great companies stalled somewhere between “idea” and “global business.”
With the 2025 Autumn Budget, I’m cautiously optimistic the tide may be turning. Not because this Budget rewrites the rulebook: it doesn’t. But because in its quieter, more technical measures, it begins to reshape the financial soil in which scale-ups can grow. More importantly, it signals something absent for too long: a belief that ambitious, high-growth firms, including those building the technologies of tomorrow, deserve not just encouragement but structural backing.
Stronger foundations for scale – not just start-up
One of the Budget’s core measures is the doubling of eligibility thresholds for enterprise tax incentives. Under the new rules, more mature companies, those with a larger headcount and greater asset base, can still benefit from schemes previously reserved for start-ups. This matters. It means firms do not lose access to tax-efficient equity tools or growth-oriented investor schemes precisely when they begin to scale. The relief is no longer just for the “garage-stage” entrepreneur, but also for those building real businesses. The Budget’s “Back your business” plan makes this explicit.
Particularly significant is the introduction of a three-year tax holiday on Stamp Duty Reserve Tax (SDRT) for firms listing in the UK, the new “UK Listing Relief.” For newly public companies on UK-regulated markets, this reduces one of the traditional frictions around liquidity and trading costs for new shareholders. It’s a move designed to boost demand for UK-listed equity, improve liquidity, and make the UK a more competitive listing location.
On the investment side, the Budget maintains the long-established Annual Investment Allowance (AIA) of £1 million, so firms can continue to deduct the full cost of qualifying investments (e.g. equipment, machinery) from taxable profits. That keeps alive a key incentive for reinvestment and growth.
These reforms, extending enterprise incentives, supporting public listing, and preserving capital-investment allowances, combine not as a radical overhaul, but as a realignment: a shift from supporting early-stage experimentation to encouraging sustainable, scale-oriented growth.
AI and the modern frontier: an explicit nod to future-tech enterprise
What distinguishes this Budget from many predecessors is not only its support for traditional SMEs and scale-ups, but its explicit backing of high-tech, future-facing sectors. The government continues to embed AI, digital and technology firms among its top priorities.
Specifically:
- The Budget builds on the government’s “modern Industrial Strategy,” formally including AI and Digital & Technologies among its “IS-8” growth-driving sectors.
- New AI Growth Zones are planned or already announced across different parts of the UK.
- To underpin the growth of AI firms and researchers, the Budget commits to a massive scale-up of computing infrastructure: over the next years, the UK will build a modern public computing ecosystem, including a national supercomputer service.
- The state is also fostering talent pipelines and skills for the AI era: supporting new AI courses, fellowships, AI-talent scholarships, and adoption programmes to help firms integrate AI into their work.
In short, for UK entrepreneurs focused on AI, data, digital platforms, or deep tech, this Budget doesn’t just offer the general tools of support. It signals that those sectors are now part of the official growth strategy, with infrastructure, skills, and regulatory attention behind them.
In a recent report summarising the Budget’s effect on tech and digital innovation, analysts confirmed that the 2025 plan positions the UK as a serious contender in AI, digital health, and clean-tech by accelerating infrastructure investment, skills training, and adoption across sectors.
This matters deeply for entrepreneurs. Because AI firms are not just “start-ups with extra code”: building an AI business requires computing, data infrastructure, talent, regulatory support, and long-term capital, precisely the building blocks this Budget begins to supply.
A signal that ambition matters – and that future-tech counts
It’s always dangerous to conflate policy changes with cultural shifts. But here – quietly, technically, structurally – the Budget sends an unmistakable message: entrepreneurship and growth matter in Britain. The government acknowledges not only the value of businesses that create jobs and pay taxes, but also those that transform economies and pioneer new industries. That includes AI, advanced manufacturing, clean energy, life sciences, and digital services.
For ambitious founders, whether building a biotech lab in Oxford, a software-driven AI start-up in Manchester, or a clean-tech firm in Glasgow, this may reclaim a sense of possibility. For investors, both domestic and international, it may restore confidence that backing UK firms is not just socially desirable but financially sensible. For the public, it may reawaken pride in British enterprise, not as modest end-goals, but as bold, ambitious visions.
Of course, there are trade-offs. The Budget also includes broader tax and spending trade-offs elsewhere. But those do not negate the value of what has been offered. Instead, they underline that this is not a windfall, but a rebalancing: a pragmatic trade between public finances and long-term growth ambition.
But culture – not just capital – must follow
Entrepreneurs don’t scale companies merely because incentives become available. They scale them because the cultural climate encourages it: investors who back early and boldly; institutions that enable innovation rather than suffocate it; regulators who are facilitators rather than gatekeepers.
That, I believe, has long been the missing ingredient in Britain. We have admired ideas. We have rewarded caution. We have scrutinised wealth. We have shied away from risk.
The Budget can’t fix all that. Only people, founders, investors, educators, and institutions can. But what it can do is supply scaffolding. And for the first time in years, the scaffolding seems to be being rebuilt, plank by plank.
A cautiously hopeful moment – for the enterprise of the future
If entrepreneurs respond with ambition, investors with appetite, and institutions with willingness to support collaboration, the UK may yet reclaim its boldness. The technical mechanisms are improving. The political rhetoric is warming. What remains is the hardest work: building a culture that values scale, risk, audacity, and the boldness to build not just companies, but futures.
So, here’s the question I return to most often, the one we cannot legislate: what about the culture of fearlessness and excitement?
If this Budget is to be more than accounting, that is what must come next. It is time to remind Britain, not only that building great companies from scratch and helping them grow can be functional and fiscally responsible, but that it can also be thrilling, courageous, and unapologetically ambitious, too.
An award-winning teacher and scholar and one of the world’s foremost thought leaders in entrepreneurship, John Mullins brings to his teaching and research 20 years of executive experience in high-growth retailing firms, including two ventures he founded and one he took public. He is the author of several best-selling books with his most recent, Break the Rules! The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs that Can Help Anyone Change the World, delving into the mindsets that enable world-class entrepreneurs to challenge assumptions, overcome obstacles, mitigate risk, and sometimes change the world.